Mail App on Macbook

drbrock

Golden Member
Feb 8, 2008
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8
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I just bought my first macbook pro and I am confused on how the mail app works. Everything connected just fine but it is downloading all 44,000 messages I have in my gmail accounts. Is it possible to just download the last week's worth of email like my iPhone does? I don't want to use 10GB of space on my mail alone.

I know this sounds like I am an idiot but I am very new to the Mac OS and system.
 

Essence_of_War

Platinum Member
Feb 21, 2013
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81
I think this is easy to fix in gmail's imap settings.

In gmail's web interface click on the gear, and go to settings.

Then click on "Forwarding and IMAP/POP" tab. Near the bottom of the IMAP section there should be a "Folder Size Limit" with an option selected for "Do not limit..." and you can change that to "Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages" with options like like 1000, 2000, etc. Just save the changes once you configure it and that should work.

There is also an option for "Configure your email client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, iPhone)". You might try clicking on that and digging through those options also.
 
Feb 25, 2011
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1,620
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The IMAP folder setting should work.

But that said, I'm going to throw out a little thought here, since I'm kind of an email pack rat myself - might you not want to have a local copy of every email, ever, forever?
 

Childs

Lifer
Jul 9, 2000
11,313
7
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The IMAP folder setting should work.

But that said, I'm going to throw out a little thought here, since I'm kind of an email pack rat myself - might you not want to have a local copy of every email, ever, forever?

Yeah, its like your own search engine for almost everything you've done online. Absolutely kills me that I lost all mine pre 2005. Upgraded my PC so many times back then I just don't know which drive had my email, or where it is.
 

drbrock

Golden Member
Feb 8, 2008
1,333
8
81
I am def a pack rat for email. However, I would rather let that sit in google servers over my computer. For example, on my iphone and ipad, only the last week is locally downloaded. I can then search for keywords on the phone to get past emails. If I don't have internet I am screwed but the majority of the time that is not a problem.

If I can do that with the MacBook Pro it would be perfect. The MacBook only comes with 128GB and I still need to put parallels and windows on it. One stupid tax program is not allowing me to go full mac. Every gig counts lol.